Twenty years after its first edition, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2012 portrays an industry suffering from the cumulative impacts of the world economic crisis, the Fukushima disaster, ferocious competitors and its own planning and management difficulties.

Two years after the Fukushima disaster started unfolding on 11 March 2011, its impact on the global nuclear industry has become increasingly visible. Global electricity generation from nuclear plants dropped by a historic 7 percent in 2012, adding to the record drop of 4 percent in 2011. This World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013 (WNISR) provides a global overview of the history, the current status and the trends of nuclear power programs worldwide.

The world’s nuclear statistics are distorted by an anomaly whose cause is not technical but political. Three years after the Fukushima events started unfolding on 11 March 2011, government, industry and international institutional organizations continue to misrepresent the effects of the disaster on the Japanese nuclear program. To find a more appropriate way to deal with this situation, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2014 proposes a new category called Long-Term Outage (LTO).

The challenge to select and assess the outstanding events of the year for the release of the July 2015 edition of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report turned out to be particularly tough: For the first time in 45 years, Japan was without nuclear electricity (and no lights went out) and, indeed, without any operating industrial nuclear facility or even research reactor; AREVA, the self-proclaimed “global leader in nuclear energy”, went technically bankrupt; China, the global leader in new-build, launched a construction site after a 15-month break; in the U.K., concerning the French sponsored new-build project, there are “growing suspicions” that the Treasury “would not be disappointed if Hinkley [Point C] never happened”; the French draft Energy Bill passed the second reading at the French National Assembly stipulating the reduction of the nuclear share from three quarters to about half by 2025; and so on.
While this report attempts to provide an overview of essential events of the past year its main aim is to identify and highlight the trends.

What They Say…

“The Report sets forth in painstaking detail the actual experience and achievements of nuclear energy around the world.”

Peter A. Bradford

Former commissionerU.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)(in his foreword to the 2013 report)